Millions of people worldwide are being affected by an outage at Skype, the hugely popular telephone and internet communication services.
The breakdown started last night and lasted for several hours. Reports from around the globe suggested that intermittent problems were continuing today.
Outages are going to be with us for many years to come, especially as these services scale up. The key thing is to have multiple channels ready if and when the next Skypefail or Twitter outage occurs.
Now of course any decent hibernating badger would care little about this inconvinience but it is after all the run up to Christmas when the whole world wants to "talk for free" or at very best make cheap calls to friends and family around the world
Tony Bates, Skype chief executive officer said “We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having.
“Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation.”
Disruption of the Skype affected at least 20 million people - who failed to make free calls (skype to skype calls) and video calls on computers.
Skype has been proud on its stable service of late, convincing millions of users, including some businesses, to use their sustems more and more to make calls and communicate. The last time Skype suffered a major problem was in 2007.
Mr Bates did not rule out the possibility that the service was the victim of a cyber attack, saying that “all avenues” were being pursued.
Supernodes
The internet communications business explained that some of their computers known as “supernodes” had been taken offline by an unspecified problem affecting some versions of Skype.
In a
post on the company blog, it said. “Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours.”
This morning Skype users on Twitter and from places including the US, Europe and Japan continue to complain that they are having problems accessing the service.
On Skype’s Twitter account, the company said that their “engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal”.
Ryan Kim, from the respected technology blog
GigaOm, wrote: “The lesson here isn’t that we should abandon online communications tools. Those are here to stay. We need to just keep our options open and be prepared to roll with the punches.
“Outages are going to be with us for many years to come, especially as these services scale up. The key thing is to have multiple channels ready if and when the next Skypefail or Twitter outage occurs.”
